Most medium to large businesses operate customer contact centers to provide support services to customers. Modern contact centers often support various channels of communication for customer interactions, including telephony, e-mail, web-page forms and instant messaging. Telephony includes automatic call handling as well as call handling by human agents at the call centers.
Reduced costs, improved customer satisfaction and revenue growth are important concerns for contact centers. Most prior work on improving contact center operations includes automatic call routing or interactive voice response to direct a customer call to an appropriate agent who may handle the customer's issue most efficiently. However, the available approaches do not use analyses of the real-time interaction between customer and contact center agent to improve agent productivity at a contact center.
Contact center agents interacting with a customer spend large amounts of time on three tasks including (a) understanding the customer's request, (b) finding the right solution or the right process for a customer's request, and (c) documenting the interaction (i.e., the request and the response) in a customer relationship management system. In addition, other employees at the so-called “back end” of a contact center review data regarding past customer-agent interactions, for example from the information entered into the customer relationship management system, in order to do quality review and to identify areas for improvement. Still other back-end employees look at the customer interactions to identify both frequently-asked and new questions and will create new documents that agents can use for answering similar requests received in the future. Most improvements in the so-called “back end” operations at a contact center are directed to improving data management of agent-input data. Those approaches generally do not analyze the best information resource in the contact center, namely the content of the agent-customer interaction, including speech, e-mail text, a chat transcript, or any other content that is used for communication with the customer. Many contact centers use a customer relationship management (CRM) system to maintain customer interaction information, including the interaction summaries maintained by most contact centers.
It is, accordingly, an objective of the invention to provide automatic call analysis of contact center interactions to assist the agent in efficiently handling the interactions.